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Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics
by Ina Garten
Learn the tricks to get the most from your ingredients.
Ina Garten’s sixth cookbook, Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics, lives up to its title. While the recipes sound extravagant, the ingredients and techniques used are simple for any cook (professional or rookie) to understand.
Garten, the Food Network’s resident East Hampton sophisticate, is known for her easy, breezy style of cooking. She believes in good food where you can taste every spice in a soup or experience the intensity of real chocolate. That is what this book is about. Garten believes in taking “ordinary ingredients and cooking them - or pairing them - in a way that ‘unlocks’ their true flavors.”
Recipes like baked shrimp scampi, with its crunchy garlic topping, sounds good immediately. But Garten says that a splash of lemon juice on top before serving adds a finishing brightness to the dish. She re-invents culinary icon James Beard’s gingerbread recipe by adding crystallized ginger and molasses for the spiciness that gingerbread deserves. It’ll make you forget all about buying it from the supermarket.
On her Food Network show, Barefoot Contessa, Garten is often seen roasting something. She thinks that this cooking method can instantly make food taste like what it should taste like. Roasted tomato caprese salad is the summer classic for the cold months. Roasting the plum tomatoes can make them taste like they were just picked from the garden, even though it’s snowing outside. Fresh mozzarella and basil complete this Italian favorite. Roasted shrimp cocktail saves the time of dealing with a pot of boiling water when cooking shrimp.
One of the most helpful details about this book is that before each chapter, Garten gives 10 cooking/entertaining tips that are honest and can be valuable indeed. Pointers like “10 things not to serve at a dinner party” and “10 no-cook things to serve for dessert” are the types of lists that should be given out at cookie swaps or pot lucks because it’s the kind of information that needs to be passed on.
What makes Garten and her cookbook so likeable is that she understands what it’s like when cooks/hosts run into problems. She used to run the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store for years, she tests recipes constantly to get them right, and she’s thrown enough dinner parties to know when something doesn’t work. Garten then passes her genius to the public and we can all feel a little bit better when working in the kitchen. Thanks to her, getting back to basics is as easy as opening her book.
Title: Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics
Author: Ina Garten
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review written by: Jill Marino
Reviewer's Rating:9
Reader's Rating: 0
Reader's Votes: 0
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